TEL, the Crisis and the Response
Everyday I get invitations to conferences. Most can only be called academic spam. You know the ones. Conferences you are not remotely interested in. Conferences with about 30 or 40 strands spanning the knowledge of the world. Conferences with a so called academic committee with around 50 members. Indeed I have even ended up on one or tow of those without my knowledge!
And then just occasionally I get something which leaps out at me. So it was when I received an email from John Traxler entitled “Call for Proposals: TEL, the Crisis and the Response. the workshop is being held at the Alpine Rendez-Vous (ARV) is ‘an established atypical scientific event’ focused on Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL). The ARV series of events are promoted by TELEARC and EATEL associations.
The call for proposals is as follows.
Background
The TEL research community has undoubtedly been successful over the last fifteen or twenty years in extending, enriching and even challenging the practices and theories of education within its professions and within its institutions, and through them has engaged in turn with the institutions and professions of industry and government. These have however been largely inward-looking discourses best suited perhaps to a world characterised by stability, progress and growth. These are all now problematic and uncertain, and call for new discourses within the TEL research community and across its borders. The world is now increasingly characterised by challenges, disturbances and discontinuities that threaten these dominant notions of stability, progress and growth. These represent the grand challenges to the TEL research community, challenges to the community to stay relevant, responsive, rigorous and useful.
Earlier discussions (eg purpos/ed, http://purposed.org.uk/ & e4c, education-for-crisis, http://educationforthecrisis.wikispaces.com/) had outlined the emergent crisis in broad terms and identified different perspectives and components, including
- economic and resource crises, including long-term radical increases in economic inequality within nations; youth unemployment across Europe, the polarisation of employment and the decline in growth; sovereign debt defaults and banking failures; mineral and energy constraints;.
- environmental and demographic crises, in particular, the implications of declining land viability for migration patterns; refugee rights and military occupations; nation-state population growth and its implications for agriculture, infrastructure and transport
- the crisis of accountability, expressed in the failure of traditional representative democracy systems especially in the context of global markets, the growth of computerised share-dealing; the emergence of new private sector actors in public services; the growth of new mass participatory movements and the rise of unelected extremist minorities both challenging the legitimacy of the nation-state and its institutions
- socio-technical disruptions and instability, exaggerated by a reliance on non-human intelligence and large-scale systems of systems in finance, logistics and healthcare, and by the development of a data-rich culture; the increasing concentration and centralisation of internet discourse in the walled gardens of social networks; the proliferation and complexity of digital divides; the dependency of our educational institutions on computer systems for research, teaching, study, and knowledge transfer
- the dehumanisation crisis, expressed in the production of fear between people, the replacement of human flourishing with consumption, the replacement of the idea of the person with the idea of the system, the replacement of human contact with mediated exchange, the commodification of the person, education and the arts
and specifically, in relation to TEL;
- TEL and the industrialisation of education; marginal communities and the globalization and corporatisation of learning; futures thinking as a way to explore TEL in relation to resilience; the political economy of technology in higher education and technological responses to the crisis of capitalism; the role of openness as a driver for innovation, equity and access; digital literacies and their capacity to shift TEL beyond skills and employability in an increasingly turbulent future; connectedness and mobility as seemingly the defining characteristics of our societies; the role and responsibility of research and of higher education as these crises unfold, the complicity or ambiguity of TEL in their development; is the current TEL ecosystem and environment sustainable, is it sufficiently responsive and resilient, how extent does TEL research question, support, stimulate, challenge and provoke its host higher education sector?
TEL is at the intersection of technology and learning and encapsulates many of the ideals, problems and potential of both. Education and technology permeate all of the perspectives outlined above, some more than others. It is possible however that they could ameliorate some of their consequences or amplify and exaggerate others. TEL has been a project and a community nurtured within the institutions and organisations of formal education in the recent decades of relative stability and prosperity in the developed nations of Asia-Pacific, North America and Western Europe. Some of the critical challenges directly relate to the perceived missions of the TEL project and its community. Contemporary formal education in schools, colleges and universities is increasingly reliant on TEL. The TEL community is however currently poorly equipped either to resist the progress of these crises today or to enable individuals and communities to flourish despite their consequences tomorrow. The transition movement, the open movement and the occupy movement are all parts of wider responses to differing perceptions and perspectives of the underlying malaise.
The Call
The proposed workshop will enrich conversations by bringing in new perspectives and will explore how the different communities can learn from each other, perhaps bringing about more open, participative and fluid models of education. It brings together researchers seeking to articulate these concerns and responses, and develop a shared understanding that will engage and inform the TEL community. It is timely, necessary and unique, and will contribute to a clearer and more worthwhile formulation of the Grand Challenges for TEL in the coming years.
One of the outputs of the workshop will be a special edition of a peer-reviewed journal; other options, such as an open access journal, a book or a website, are possible if there is a consensus.
Please submit an individual or collective two-page position paper, or propose a structured discussion or debate on the role and place of TEL in the light of our analysis. Contributions will be selected by the organisers on the basis of individual quality of the papers and the overall balance and coherence of the programme.
Proposals should be sent to John Traxler by 17 August.
